Police chiefs are worried they'll lose their spying capabilities after NSA revelations
The International Association of Chiefs of Police is having their annual conference this week. The conference provides a venue for officials from departments nationwide, as well as representatives from the federal Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and private corporations, to meet and share information about policing methodologies, technologies, and political issues related to their profession.
Among the subjects discussed yesterday was the way in which the NSA leaks are affecting the public's view of police department surveillance. From Reuters:
The leak of highly classified documents by National Security Agency Edward Snowden prompted tighter restrictions on key technology advances, said Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan, speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference.
The disclosures, including about monitoring of U.S. phone records, threaten to erode existing authority to use high-tech equipment, he said.
"The scrutiny that the NSA has come under filters down to us," Keenan said at the annual gathering that draws top law enforcement from the United States and elsewhere with workshops, product exhibits and conferences.
He said guidelines for collecting data varied widely from state to state. License plate data is retained for 48 hours to five years, for example, depending on local law, he said.
For many new technologies, there is no clear legal standard to govern their use, he said.
"If we are not very careful, law enforcement is going to lose the use of technology," he said.
New technology including advanced facial recognition software, mobile license plate readers and unmanned aircraft are reshaping U.S. law enforcement, officials said.
Such advances will be "both the benefactor and the curse of policing" and demand that law enforcement be thoughtful about their deployment, Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey said on Saturday at the start of the weeklong conference.
"Imagine instead of driving down the street scanning license tags, driving down the street checking the faces of individuals walking down the street," Ramsey said.
"We have to remind ourselves - just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it."
The Philly police chief is right. Law enforcement is confronted with a citizenry that is waking up to the reality of the surveillance state, which includes local police department participation in federal monitoring programs like "Suspicious Activity Reporting," as well as the deployment of high-tech tools like license plate readers, surveillance cameras, and automated tracking technologies.
Ramsey warns that police shouldn't do things simply because they can -- that they shouldn't take advantage of a legal climate in which technology has far surpassed legal protections. But that doesn't go nearly far enough.
Instead of asking police departments to police themselves, we need clear laws to govern how departments can use these new technologies. The Fourth Amendment provides critical guidelines, but courts, legislatures, and police departments have varying views on how exactly to apply those guidelines to new surveillance and identification technologies.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/20/us-usa-police-chiefs-idUSBRE99J07Y20131020?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews
http://privacysos.org/node/1215
FBI director at Police Chiefs conference laments about job loss but declines to mention how their budget doubled:
James Comey, the new director of the FBI, and Attorney General Eric Holder, neither of which have a history of prioritizing Americans' civil liberties.
Comey has made his appearance, but rather than attempt to "calm" the suddenly rational voices of law enforcement, he took this opportunity to complain about the FBI's budget woes, something he's done pretty much nonstop since he took the position.
At a time when FBI agents play a larger role than ever fighting violent crime and terrorism, they are facing potentially devastating cuts because of congressional budget slashing.
“I’m required to cut 3,500 positions, to cut my operations to the bone, to do things like ration gas money and to stare at the prospect of sending my folks home for an extended period,” FBI Director James Comey said.
Comey claims a loss of projected cut of $800 million (from a budget of $8.1 billion) will result in the slashing of 3,600 jobs. Before he gets to the point of handing out pink slips, he may want to take a look at some areas where money's being wasted.
The FBI's budget has more than doubled since 2001 ($3.2 billion to $8.1 billion). It has also added nearly 7,000 positions over that same period. The FBI goes on at length about its counterterrorism work but there's little hard evidence to support the theory that the terrorist threat has expanded at the same rate as its budget. But this discrepancy between budget and staff indicates the issue isn't too many employees.
The FBI funds a "Hollywood division" that provides consultation and free use of FBI facilities to TV and movie producers. This $1.5 million expenditure isn't much more than a couple of atoms of the drop in the bucket, considering the agency's $8 billion budget, but it seems to be set up in the most ingratiatingly backwards way. Shouldn't studios be paying the FBI for its expertise and facilities, rather than allowing taxpayers to pick up the tab? Just something to consider, Comey.
After Comey's first statements on the agency's budget woes, the ACLU made some suggestions of its own. Why not eliminate some programs that rank high on the busywork scale but low on actual results? Bonus: fewer civil liberties violations and their attendant lawsuits. In addition to the questionable profiling performed under its "Domain Management" programs, there's plenty of waste to be found in other intelligence gathering/investigative programs.
Modifications to guidelines governing the FBI's domestic operations in 2008 gave it the leeway to perform "assessment," i.e. intrusive investigations targeted at persons without any suspicion of illegal activity or threats to national security.
In the two years from March of 2009 to March 2011, the FBI opened more than 82,000 of these assessments of people and groups without a factual basis to suspect wrongdoing. Only 3,315 of these assessments found information sufficient to justify further investigation.
The Suspicious Activity Reporting program is also a failure, although the FBI notes that the thousands of "tips" it receives a year justify continued funding. (It glosses over the fact that the SAR system is nearly as worthless as its "assessments.")
The ACLU of Northern California recently obtained hundreds of SARs from California, including many that were entered into eGuardian, which clearly show people are targeted based on racial and religious characteristics and First Amendment-protected activity like photography.
The Government Accountability Office criticized the federal government's SAR programs for failing to establish metrics to determine whether they actually improve security. Any program that violates rights and doesn't improve security should be closed immediately.
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2013/10/21/fbi-director-makes-plea-to-reverse-impending-budget-cuts/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131023/12260624986/fbi-director-uses-appearance-international-police-convention-to-complain-about-fbi-budget-cuts.shtml